In the “muck” with Amazon.com

Baris Karadogan, a partner at ComVentures, discusses Amazon.com’s latest effort to provide startup companies with storage and other services in an opinion piece on VentureBeat.

Karadogan writes:

Amazon wants to give start-ups bandwidth, storage, server software and even fulfillment of physical goods — all at a reasonable price. This is all the boring stuff you need to go from your great idea to a product. Google and Salesforce.com call this infrastructure “the cloud,” Microsoft calls it “a million pounds of batteries,” and Amazon.com calls it “muck.”

…We VC’s don’t see Series A opportunities that say “we are thinking of raising $500K to launch our web site and about $700M to build a global data center.” These startups go to hosting providers and buy computing and storage by the drink. This is what Amazon wants to provide startups, everything; the software, the hardware, the bandwidth and even physical fulfillment.

Interestingly, this trend could have a big impact on the Pacific Northwest technology industry.

As Amazon and others host more Web-based services for themselves or others, they will need new data centers to store all of the information.